Book description
Ever dreamed of owning your boyhood football club?
Simon Jordan grew up a stone's throw from Crystal Palace Football
Club. As a boy he used to break into the Palace ground for a
kick-about on the hallowed turf. On leaving school he entered the
mobile phone business. By the age of thirty-two, he'd built a company
from nothing, sold it for £75 million and bought his childhood club.
By the age of forty-two Palace was in administration and Jordan had
lost nigh on everything.
Be Careful What You Wish For lifts the lid on the owner's
story and reveals for the first time how the national game really
works. Jordan spares no one, least of all himself, as he takes us
inside a world where hopes and aspirations sit alongside greed,
self-interest, overpriced players, dodgy transfers and top-level
incompetence. He doesn't hold back.
Breathtakingly honest, highly controversial, humorous and full of
jaw-dropping anecdotes, Be Careful What You Wish For is far
more than a football book. It is a social commentary on the culture of
great wealth and ambition; a Shakespearean tragedy that exposes the
dark side of chasing a dream.
Simon Jordan is a serial entrepreneur who made his fortune in the
mobile phone industry. He started the Pocket Phone Shop in 1994
expanding it to over 200 outlets by the time of its sale in 2000. In the
same year he bought Crystal Palace Football Club, becoming the youngest
ever owner of a Football League club. During his ten years in football
covering the entire decade of the noughties he became one of the game's
most recognisable faces. He is the author of a critically acclaimed
series of columns in the
Observer,
the founder and former owner of the car magazine,
Octane,
former owner of an award-winning restaurant and bar, and star of a major
ITV series,
Fortune Millionaire Giveaway
. In 2008 he produced and solely funded the critically-lauded British
film,
Telstar
, the story of the legendary record producer and songwriter, Joe Meek,
starring Kevin Spacey.
